3. Specify Download Speed / Download Rate Using wget –limit-rate

While executing the wget, by default it will try to occupy full possible bandwidth. This might not be acceptable when you are downloading huge files on production servers. So, to avoid that we can limit the download speed using the –limit-rate as shown below.

4. Continue the Incomplete Download Using wget -c

This is very helpful when you have initiated a very big file download which got interrupted in the middle. Instead of starting the whole download again, you can start the download from where it got interrupted using option -c

Note: If a download is stopped in middle, when you restart the download again without the option -c, wget will append .1 to the filename automatically as a file with the previous name already exist. If a file with .1 already exist, it will download the file with .2 at the end.

5. Download in the Background Using wget -b

For a huge download, put the download in background using wget option -b as shown below.

$ wget -b http://www.openss7.org/repos/tarballs/strx25-0.9.2.1.tar.bz2
Continuing in background, pid 1984.
Output will be written to `wget-log'.

It will initiate the download and gives back the shell prompt to you. You can always check the status of the download using tail -f as shown below.

Some websites can disallow you to download its page by identifying that the user agent is not a browser. So you can mask the user agent by using –user-agent options and show wget like a browser as shown below.

7. Test Download URL Using wget –spider

When you are going to do scheduled download, you should check whether download will happen fine or not at scheduled time. To do so, copy the line exactly from the schedule, and then add –spider option to check.

Monitoring whether a website is available or not at certain intervals.

Check a list of pages from your bookmark, and find out which pages are still exists.

8. Increase Total Number of Retry Attempts Using wget –tries

If the internet connection has problem, and if the download file is large there is a chance of failures in the download. By default wget retries 20 times to make the download successful.

If needed, you can increase retry attempts using –tries option as shown below.

$ wget --tries=75 DOWNLOAD-URL

9. Download Multiple Files / URLs Using Wget -i

First, store all the download files or URLs in a text file as:

$ cat > download-file-list.txt
URL1
URL2
URL3
URL4

Next, give the download-file-list.txt as argument to wget using -i option as shown below.

$ wget -i download-file-list.txt

10. Download a Full Website Using wget –mirror

Following is the command line which you want to execute when you want to download a full website and made available for local viewing.

$ wget --mirror -p --convert-links -P ./LOCAL-DIR WEBSITE-URL

–mirror : turn on options suitable for mirroring.

-p : download all files that are necessary to properly display a given HTML page.

–convert-links : after the download, convert the links in document for local viewing.

-P ./LOCAL-DIR : save all the files and directories to the specified directory.

11. Reject Certain File Types while Downloading Using wget –reject

You have found a website which is useful, but don’t want to download the images you can specify the following.

$ wget --reject=gif WEBSITE-TO-BE-DOWNLOADED

12. Log messages to a log file instead of stderr Using wget -o

When you wanted the log to be redirected to a log file instead of the terminal.

$ wget -o download.log DOWNLOAD-URL

13. Quit Downloading When it Exceeds Certain Size Using wget -Q

When you want to stop download when it crosses 5 MB you can use the following wget command line.

$ wget -Q5m -i FILE-WHICH-HAS-URLS

Note: This quota will not get effect when you do a download a single URL. That is irrespective of the quota size everything will get downloaded when you specify a single file. This quota is applicable only for recursive downloads.

14. Download Only Certain File Types Using wget -r -A

You can use this under following situations:

Download all images from a website

Download all videos from a website

Download all PDF files from a website

$ wget -r -A.pdf http://url-to-webpage-with-pdfs/

15. FTP Download With wget

You can use wget to perform FTP download as shown below.

Anonymous FTP download using Wget

$ wget ftp-url

FTP download using wget with username and password authentication.

$ wget --ftp-user=USERNAME --ftp-password=PASSWORD DOWNLOAD-URL

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